SOURCE: “Tragic Death and Dull Survival,” in The Music of the Close: The Final Scenes of Shakespeare's Tragedies, pp. 1-28, University Press of Kentucky, 1978.

In the excerpt below, Foreman identifies and discusses a set of features that he finds in the final scenes of Shakespeare's tragedies: the tragic figure's readiness for death, his or her spiritual or emotional isolation, the establishment of a new order in the world of the play, and the relative dullness of the characters who will administer this new order. Foreman also comments on three tragic endings that deviate from this pattern: Troilus and Cressida, Richard III, and Macbeth. Finally, he touches briefly on each of the tragedies whose concluding scenes are shaped by the motive of sexual love: Romeo and Juliet, Othello, Macbeth, Troilus and Cressida, and Antony and Cleopatra.

1

We that are young shall never see so much. 

A dying man, early...